What is covered, week by week, and which topics each lecture draws on.
Every lecture the course claims to run gets a dated page and a teaching-team
reference. A course decides how many lectures it needs; one of them carries a
real deck. related: connects lectures to the sessions and assessments they
feed.
Week 1: A Short History of Public Misconduct
What this course studies, why it studies it as a discipline rather than a complaint, and the method every later week reuses.
Week 1 · 26 July 2027
Week 2: The Classroom as a Contested Acoustic Jurisdiction
One room, two entirely different kinds of violation — a cough at the fully deniable end, an answered phone call at the fully overt end.
Week 2 · 2 August 2027
Week 3: Socio-Political Dynamics of Confinement in Vertical Transit
A box with one door, one button panel, and no way to leave — read as the purest small-scale power structure in the built environment.
Week 3 · 9 August 2027
Week 4: An Acoustic-Ethnographic Inquiry into the Reading Room
How sound actually travels through a reading room, and why "shush" is such an unreliable countermeasure.
Week 4 · 16 August 2027
Week 5: Socio-Political Dynamics of Seat-Saving in Contemporary Cafés
A jacket on a chair is a territorial claim with no legal standing and near-total local enforcement. This week asks why that works, and when it stops. Assignment 1 due this week.
Week 5 · 23 August 2027
Week 6: Spatial Sovereignty and the Unpriced Transit Commons
Armrests, poles, and the seat next to yours — a jurisdictional survey of how much space one passenger can annex before another one objects.
Week 6 · 30 August 2027
Week 7: A Phenomenological Inquiry into Queueing and Threshold Litter in Unmarked Commons
Two space-agnostic public-commons cases, elevated to civilisational infrastructure — a queue held together by nothing but mutual glaring, and litter that piles up in the last few metres before a bin. An early heads-up — Assignment 2 is due in Week 9.
Week 7 · 6 September 2027
Week 8: A Fluid-Dynamics Inquiry into Discontinuity Propagation in Ambulatory Flow
Stopping dead in a moving crowd to check your phone, and the pile-up that follows — read as a fluid-dynamics problem with a person at the front.
Week 8 · 13 September 2027
Week 9: Towards a Unified Theory of Deniable Discourtesy
A meta-analytic synthesis week — no new case, just the bad-manner/good-manner method turned back on three earlier cases to see whether it actually generalises, or merely repeats itself with new nouns. Assignment 2 due this week.
Week 9 · 20 September 2027
Week 10: A Phenomenological Inquiry into Acoustic Self-Deception in the Public Restroom
The one public space designed around pretending nobody can hear anything — and what happens when that pretence is dropped.
Week 10 · 27 September 2027
Week 11: Practicum — Performing the Exaggeration
Nine weeks of cataloguing other people's violations; this week you commit one, on purpose, under supervision, and describe it honestly afterward.
Week 11 · 4 October 2027
Week 12: Capstone — Writing Up an Anti-Manners Report
Turning eleven weeks of case studies and one live performance into a single analytical argument, and reviewing that argument in practice questions ahead of the Final Exam.
Week 12 · 11 October 2027